Dyslexia and Post-Secondary Aural Skills Instruction

Abstract

Traditional post-secondary aural-skills curricula can create extreme difficulties for music majors with dyslexia. This article places the author’s experience teaching these students into the context of contemporary scientific and educational research on dyslexia, including a potential subtype of dyslexia that may impact the reading of musical notation while reading of text is unaffected. From the standpoint of a social model of disability, the existence of dyslexia is contested. However, new models of dyslexia frame it not as a disability but a byproduct of superior cognitive strengths in forms of reasoning hitherto undervalued in traditional education. Identifying and building on these strengths in students with dyslexia may aid instructors in designing effective pedagogical strategies that help these students improve in typical aural-skills tasks. Such strategies may be equally beneficial for all students. Working closely with dyslexic students and others who struggle with traditional aural-skills tasks leads to more fundamental questions about the assumptions and values implicit in standard aural-skills curricula. The principles of Universal Design for Learning may facilitate the design of courses that allow all students to grow in response to challenges by recognizing and recruiting their individual cognitive strengths.